Whether one likes it or not, money is a big part of life. Yes, it’s just paper, but that paper represents value, so it’s kind of silly to make it all look like people, organizations, and governments are so insanely focused on just paper.
No matter how much I love the scene of Joker burning a pile of it while laughing at the endless stupidity of humans enslaved by consumerism and carnal addictions, I know that the same is possible for me only if I am completely alone, unattached to anything in this life, and with absolutely nothing to lose.
We are mostly done with the barter system and completely done with using coins that carry value in themselves (such as gold and silver) for obvious reasons. But whatever our current money is made of — paper or even digital zeros and ones — it still has value.
Human beings are good at operating symbols. In case of money, these symbols are difficult enough to fake or steal. Performing illegal activities turns out to be super difficult and potentially deadly, so most people resort to actually earning this “just paper”. Great value is ascribed to something that’s hard to get whether it’s paper or numbers on the screen, which ensures that the herd will continue grinding and rolling, making this whole system functioning in a safe, controlled, predictable way.
It sounds ridiculous, but even the money which doesn’t exist has value (credits). By value I mean that you can exchange it for something useful or desired, that’s it.
“Good people are never rich” mentality.
I was a kid in late 80-s — early 90-s. I spent my early childhood in the former USSR. The Soviet Union was founded in 1922 and officially fell apart on December 8, 1991, but of course the process wasn’t abrupt. Many changes leading to its collapse were happening in economics and politics prior to this specific date.
At the time of USSR collapse my parents and I lived in a small East-European country called Moldova. If you are unfamiliar with the region, you might have never heard of it, so I’ll name the two bigger countries bordering it — Romania and Ukraine. Romania never was a part of the Soviet Union, but Ukraine was.
Needless to say, 69 years of the Soviet rule over Russia and adjacent countries formed a unique set of socio-cultural phenomena specific to the USSR in general and every single region in particular.
While each country kept its own language and culture (the government welcomed ethnic and cultural variety as long as everyone followed the rules which applied everywhere), Russian language has become an official language on the whole territory of the union. Religion (the church) wasn’t particularly striving during my childhood thanks to the early years of Bolshevik revolution and the beginning of the Soviet rule. But of course religious beliefs survived, and most of the older folks kept their affiliations, be it Christianity, Islam, or less common beliefs such as paganism and practice of herbalism, nature magic, and traditional witchcraft.
I am briefly mentioning this whole Soviet thing simply because I want to make a note of how the overall culture of the place one grows up in affects his or her attitude to the financial aspect of life. As for the “money” part of my Soviet childhood, I am now getting to it.
As we all know, the Soviet Union was an attempt of creating the communist system in which everyone would not only survive, but also strive while having just enough of everything needed for a good, comfortable life.
This never happened the way it had been planned. Creators of the system must have been very manipulative or very delusional, or both.
Soviet propaganda for the millions of regular “working class” people focused of praising work and being conservative with one’s spending and desires. People were consistently brainwashed into thinking that excess money is a VERY BAD THING.
“We don’t want to become the spoiled bourgeois, the rotten upper class, those disgusting hedonists we revolted against in the first place.”
But society doesn’t work this way.
The system claimed that there were no more “social classes” and everyone was equal. Really? 🙄 One must be a complete idiot not to see that even after the bloody revolution there were “common people” and intellectuals, scientists and peasants, descendants of the so-called “aristocracy” and children of cooks and maids.
It’s a fact of life, a statement of how human beings function. I want to clarify that this is NOT my attempt to put down some parts of the population. I choose to be honest with my own perceptions, and I don’t want to be blindly assuming that just because someone says we are equal, we actually are.
Does a son of a maid or a king’s cook have the same social and intellectual potential as the son of a field marshal? Intellectual — maybe (not all the time), but not social, not at all. Does it make him unworthy of life, dignity, and a chance to succeed in life? Definitely not! But pretending that everyone has an equal mindset, equal social status, and equally educated parents is a lie. We can’t make people “all the same” just by stripping some of all their wealth and rights and gifting those wealth and rights to the people who never had it and have not a slightest idea what to do with it.
If you are a maid, be proud of it and love yourself, but don’t claim you are intellectually, educationally, and socially equal to a person who was born into a family of doctors who have been doctors for the past 10 generations. Doctors and maids are equally valuable and deserving as Human Beings, and one or the other can be a monster or a saint, but these jobs, educations, responsibilities, and their positions in society are NOT the same.
The question is, “Should doctors be praised more and get paid more than maids?” I want to say no, but I know that people tend to perform better when they get paid better. I could easily deal with some crumbled bed liners or bad cleaning service, but I don’t want to deal with a failed surgery because the surgeon doesn’t feel like putting enough effort today.
What I am saying is that even in communism one can’t simply group people working the fields and factories with scientists, writers, researchers, financial advisors, inventors, etc., and expect there to be no difference whatsoever.
As human beings, we have not reached that level of mental and spiritual development where everyone is the same, feels the same, looks the same, wants the same things, and is happy about it. And to reach this level of no consumerism, no division, no extra needs?.. It will never work to just throw a bunch of different people in the same pot and tell them, “Now you are all equal and will have the same things, needs, income, food, clothes, rules, living quarters, education, life plan, so be happy about it.”
I am not putting down the working class. I come from it. It could have been different for us and many other people if the Bolshevik revolution never happened. If it didn’t, my grandparents and parents would probably end up studying and working in different areas of life since some of our grand-grandparents had set up a base for their own businesses and intellectual endeavors. The Bolshevik revolution and subsequent WW2 (which was actually geographically happening on the USSR land) were two events that changed the course of overall history AND specific family histories of many individuals.
The society doesn’t work this way (the communist way) because ALL people don’t want the same thing. Yes, our basic needs are very similar — everyone wants to be safe, loved, and happy. That’s the basic of it all, but when you go a little beyond basic needs, we all are interested in different things because we aren’t robots or clones, and no system or rule can achieve complete uniformity unless it manages to brainwash every-single-individual with extreme amounts of direct propaganda and mind control, possibly even through biochemical means.
*I am not sure if you are aware of this, but they are trying to create this brainwashing scenario in many countries NOW, and of course it has nothing to do with communism.
In the U.S., they do it through food, entertainment industry, consumerism, fear of various “enemies”, and general dumbing down of the population. And it still doesn’t work a 100%!* Even programs like “Monarch” and McUltra and other crap, and all the things we are being fed and led to consume don’t eradicate ALL thinkers, seekers, and people generally dissatisfied with the current state of life in the society. By the way, please do not confuse me with the lunatic “woke” light worker section of the Internet, I have nothing to do with them.
The communism system can’t work in today’s society because you can’t just force it on everyone and expect acceptance.
O this goes for any other drastically different system for that matter. No government will have the means of brainwashing a population of a whole country unless it’s a population consisting of two-year-olds raised by the system itself. With existing adults (parents, grandparents, teachers, caretakers) this process can’t happen quickly. It would take many generations to be accomplished to the point where everyone blindly obeys.
We have seen the attempts to achieve total obedience in the past 4 years of “Covid” craze, and it really hurt me to see little kids getting used to “the new normal” of face masks. I don’t know why the process was haltered, but yeah, among other things (including health and safety precautions) this was a clear attempt to perform a psychological experiment on a whole new generation of younger people and see what happens when 3, 4, 5 year olds grow up hiding their own faces and see their peers and adults constantly covered up.
So, in the Soviet Union, where everyone was supposed to be equal and everybody’s needs were supposed to be met, things worked in a curious way. After the war lots of things got really screwed up, of course, and people realized that they needed to work harder and not complain since the economy suffered greatly. According to the officially accepted statistics, the losses of people during WW2 on the USSR territory equal to about 26.6 million lives. Around 9 million of those were actual soldiers, but the rest were regular people who lived in the countryside and worked the land.
After the end of the war most of the working class was eager to make it all better. People were encouraged to work hard and be happy about it. There were incentives for those who achieved greater results, but overall people worked hard because for the longest time they believed in the idea of “raising from the ashes” of war like a phoenix. The eagerness of many was based on the true belief in their great country and its bright future.
But was it? Somehow in the place where everyone was supposed to be equal, some people still had bigger apartments and better cars, and others could get foreign clothes that were considered a luxury, and yet others would somehow get their hands on better watches and radios, and “western” music, and tickets to go to a fancy resort or even abroad for a vacation. Not all restaurants had the same price tags, and definitely they didn’t have the same foods. Regular folks would never make it to the same places where the seats were saved for politicians, scientists, cinema directors and writers, and other “higher” status individuals.
Foreign currencies were prohibited to own during Soviet times, and one could go to jail for sale and possession. And of course when something is made illegal, it immediately opens opportunities for black market dealers.
Communism or not, people kept doing what people do. This is not to say that the idea itself was bad. It’s just that 1) it hasn’t been implemented in the right way 2) people weren’t mentally and spiritually ready for it 3) people in power had agenda other than “happiness for all”
All that said, when I look back at my childhood, I remember one clear pattern: I grew up with a subconscious conviction that money is NOT valuable. No, not just at that. The idea was that money was evil.
Every story and fairytale I read as a child had a “good” main character who was very poor. This hero would live with rich relatives who were super mean, or serve a rich boss who was also very mean and morally rotten. Of course, at the end of each story this main character would reach prosperity — inherit a kingdom, marry a princess, or kill the mean king and become a fair ruler. But that was AFTERWARDS. It seems like in order to be a good character, one always had to start in the dirt.
Specifically Soviet time children’s books and stories were always about the kids who helped their partners, were honest and hardworking, and did things for the betterment of their community. One of the things being praised was preaching those who did bad at school, disobeyed parents, or didn’t work hard enough. Laziness especially was frowned upon. Kids (and adults alike) were encouraged to tell on each other so that the community could find the delinquent ones and “fix” their behavior.
In the movies and literature we were often shown bourgeois characters who were spoiled, lazy, perverted, fallen victim to greed and decadence, and generally unfit to be “good, decent people”.
My parents were poor, but not drastically poor like “starving”. We didn’t live in the slums or anything like that. There was always food on the table. My mom and dad could go a whole year in one pair of shoes (and another one for winter), wear the same clothes, and have to put a curtain to split one room into two, but I never realized that there was something wrong with any of that.
I was a happy child. I had good parents and grandparents. I was never starved. The idea that I could want more or have more rarely crossed my mind, and all the stories I was exposed to were never about luxury. Typically, the main female character of the stories I’ve read was always the maid who would clean all day, wear ragged clothes, and serve her mean step-sisters. When asked what I wanted to be, I would say “scuba diver” or “horse jockey”, but I never felt like I was missing out because I didn’t have a horse. I’d always think I would have a horse in the future, “when the time comes”, without realizing how expensive it is to own a horse.
When I became a little older, things were changing. New products started appearing on the market because the borders were no longer crossed. Western toys and clothes, and movies, and sweets… And suddenly I wanted a Barbie and some other stuff, but I never really begged or asked to be given things because by then I consciously knew that my parents weren’t rich. In my mind, being NOT rich was still a good thing. Or maybe it just wasn’t a “bad thing”, but something neutral, a fact of life?
In any case, it didn’t really bother me; if they could buy me something attractive, I was happy. But if they didn’t, I was happy still as long as they were happy, not arguing, and not having problems. I was growing up with this slightly contemptuous feeling toward money.
If someone asked me what I wanted, I’d never say “I want to be rich.” It actually didn’t cross my mind. I failed to associate money with happiness even though I wanted to travel, see places, have certain things, and live in different cities. It’s almost as if in my mind the correlation between money and things was broken. Money = travel. Money = horses. Money = high quality clothes and shoes, good food, summer vacations, scuba diving, surfing, camping, sports, saunas, plane flights, theatre performances… But in my mind, this “equal sign” was somehow absent. Instead, there was the subconscious belief that “rich people are all rotten”, so I illogically expected to be able to have things and do things that I want while NOT being rich. The fact that it doesn’t work this way wasn’t even in the picture.
Today I wonder if my attitude toward financial aspect of life was formed by the socio-cultural environment I grew up in, my parents, or maybe my past lives (he-he), or my own mental tendencies and character. I’m pretty sure it results from a combination of things, but looking back at my wonderful childhood I can’t help but notice that back then there was a certain agenda and propaganda designed to teach people NOT to want financial success. And while it didn’t work overall (since communism as a system failed and even during the Soviet times people would still try to get a “better piece” of everything for themselves), it surely had noticeable effects on people’s mentality and the ability to work for themselves.